Apr 7, 2016

Feeling sad because your laptop is not fast enough to play Steam games on Ubuntu? Tried to use the 3rd party graphic card drivers and didn't feel any difference? Worry not, here's how to definitely improve game performance.

Getting ready: you should probably uninstall all third party drivers and reboot. Make sure you recently did an apt-get update and dist-upgrade.

Update the kernel.

Even with apt-get dist-upgrade, the kernel will not be updated to the latest available. In Linux, hardware support comes mostly from the kernel, and Ubuntu's kernel is way behind the main kernel branch. This is for stability and safety reasons. But you're not after stability, you want to get usage out of hardware. Update that kernel. Here's how:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds

This step is basically just finding, downloading and installing 3 or 4 .deb files. Easy.

I would recommend rebooting after this step.

Do uname -r before and after this step to confirm the new kernel version is in use.

Test it out.

It should probably be faster now. If you want, you can also try and go back to using the third party graphic/aditional driver to see if it makes things faster, now that you are using a more recent kernel. I didn't do this, but hey, experiment. :)